Listening to lots of:

Monthly Archives: January 2017

Recently I found and painted up a bunch of “Nightmares” from the long-OOP game Legions of Steel that I’d had stored in various boxes of random figures since the 1990’s. Clearly these models were inspired by James Cameron’s Terminator films, and given that I recently purchased some Terminator Genisys starter sets from Warlord Games when they were on deep Black Friday discount (because rofl@£70.00), I figured I should paint up some of the actual figures. The Resistance figures don’t excite me all that much, so I’ll likely not start on those until all of the Machines are done.

Right-handed T-800 Endoskeletons…

I set some of the Endos aside to work out weapon swaps a bit later, and just decided to knock out a set worth as stock figures. If need be, I can run Imperial Guardsmen, etc as Resistance if I want to learn and play the game in the meantime, but let’s be realistic, that’s not happening anytime soon.

Left-handed T-800 Endoskeletons…

I painted these using the same methods as the Nightmares so they share the same palette and will fit in nicely alongside one another. As originally considered, the Nightmares can act as T-600s/Prototype Endos in the Terminator game, and the T-800 Endoskeletons can join the Nightmares as Iron Warriors cultists as needed – more abominations courtesy of the Dark Mechanicum. I also added a few skulls to some of their bases because Terminator.

“Crawler” T-800 Endoskeletons.

I also knocked out 5 “crawlers” using the same methods. Not sure what they’ll be used for outside of the Terminator Genisys game, but hey, they were easy to paint and they add another 5 models to my completed numbers for the YTD.

Legions of Steel Nightmares provide T-600/Prototype support to their T-800 Endoskeleton brethren.

We’ve got two dwarves today. One old enough to quality as right proper Oldhammer, and the other quite recent.

The first of the two, sometimes called “Dwarf Ninja” and other times “Dwarf Rogue” comes from the Dwarf Adventurers line found in the 1988 Citadel Catalogue, meaning he was released around 1887 or thereabouts. Looking through the 1987 Citadel Journal, the Dwarves in there, also by the Perry Twins are of a slightly different style to this one. I got this figure back in the day, started painting him, stopped, then restarted, did what I thought was a great job, screwed it up with a black wash, restarted and finally finished him recently. He’s got a vaguely middle eastern feel, with the scarf around his head, and so I painted his skin in a slightly different-to-usual tone compared to how I usually paint my dwarves. He also has a nice line in thieves’ tools on his belt.

His partner in crime is another of Stonehaven’s dwarves from their 2012 Kickstarter. I’ve shared a few of thesefigures before now, and if I ever finish painting the lot of them I’ll do a group shot. This dwarf rogue was started a couple of years ago to represent an NPC in our very, very occasional Pathfinder campaign. She fit the bill perfectly, and so a couple of weeks ago I saw the half-painted figure sitting on my desk and finally made myself finish her off. No thieves tools in play here, just a pair of dual-wielded daggers for some stabby good times.

I think they make quite the pair.

Aside from the obvious use in role-playing games and as a character meeple in various board games, I’ve started to think about combining a bunch of the more out-there Dwarf Adventurer types into a unit for Kings of War. Possibly using the berserker stat line to represent them being a bit more reckless but a hell of a lot more dangerous than your regular dwarf. We’ll see…

I am a casual player of X-Wing at best. I’d like to play more, but my limited free time is the biggest difficulty I have. I had a couple of starter sets, and a very respectable pile of additional ships. Regardless, shortly after the middle of 2016, I went on an X-Wing shopping rampage. I then followed that with a Star Wars Armada shopping rampage, buying a bunch of stuff for that game from scratch. I also picked up the official Starfield theme mat from a local game store for what I felt was a reasonable price.

Fantasy Flight Games’ X-Wing 3×3 Starfield Game Mat. The glare is the result of my down spotlights.

The FFG mat is on neoprene (mouse pad material) and is very nice. It’s the perfect size for basic games of X-Wing, and I assume, Armada as well (haven’t played it yet). I can see it also being useful for any other small-scale space games as well, as a Starfield is nice and generic. I’m thinking that it could potentially work really nicely for GW’s upcoming offering – Gangs of Commorragh as well.

Just to remind you…

So we played X-Wing. We enjoyed the game and had fun. But with a decent sized trio of X-Wing fighter wings landing, as well as a solid pair of fleets for Armada, it was obvious that we’d need to expand the play area from the basic 3×3 to the next tier, which is officially 6×3. I looked around for options, and considered the Death Star Assault mat to place alongside the Starfield, but as cool as the Death Star looks, I felt it was more than a little too specific, and I wouldn’t want to be playing all of my larger games in the shadow of the Death Star, so I just kind of forgot about it for awhile.

Urbanmatz’ 6×3 Space Mat. Once again, the glare in the centre is the result of my down spotlights.

I enquired about mats that might suit my regular 28mm figures’ bases in a thread on Dakka, and Martin from Urbanmatz responded, suggesting that I take a look at one of his offerings. More on that later on, but in the end I placed an order for three mats from Urbanmatz, with VAT removed and the quantity making shipping much more reasonable than ordering one or two – Mighty Ape sells Urbanmatz’ mats individually for about AU$150 – the same price I can buy them direct from Urbanmatz from when paying shipping for each individual mat. Except Mighty Ape then adds their own shipping on top! Much cheaper to buy and support them directly and get a few mats a once to combine the shipping costs, so that’s what I did. The one we’re looking at in this review is obviously the Urbanmatz Space 6’x3′ mat.

One of the larger stars with a subtle nebula around it on Urbanmatz’ Space mat.

Martin also offered me a free damaged snow mat with my order, and I responded that I’d be quite happy to receive one. I’m mentioning this here both to be upfront about receiving a freebie, and importantly to point out that the (let’s face it) generous gesture from Martin doesn’t influence this review or my opinion on his mats at all, since it it were rubbish, I’d state as much. This is neither paid, nor a promotion, after all. After placing my order in November, I was emailed to let me know that they were out of stock of one of the styles I’d ordered, and would I like to change the mat, or get a refund, or just wait. Since I know how slowly my hobby stuff moves, and the state of the War Room (still not 100% cleared and cleaned up) I elected to wait – but I really do appreciate the email. I’ve had ordered from e-tailers have significant delays in shipping more than a few times, and usually I find that there’s no contact after a confirmation email. And then of course I get mightily pissed off at the wall of silence for weeks after placing an order. Getting emailed to ask what I want to do when an item is out of stock is a really nice bit of customer service in my opinion, and definitely something that mollifies my potential rage. So a pretty good shopping experience overall.

The other larger stars on Urbanmatz’ offering. As can be seen, their biggest, brightest stars are still pretty subtle.

So in mid-December my mats arrived, having been dispatched around the 6th via FedEx with tracking from the Czech Republic. On seeing the long, heavy box, my friend Pyrowave asked me what it was, and I responded by telling him it was a deactivated rocket launcher I’d purchased from the Czech Republic(!) I buy a lot of random gamer-ish crap, so it was actually sort of believable. To him, at least. 😉 Fast forward about a month until tonight, and I finally got the room cleaned up enough to lay out some mats on the gaming table. I opened up the Space Mat to take a look at it, and figured that I may as well take some photographs and review it, as well as the official mat at the same time.

FFG on top, Urbanmatz below. Very, very close in thickness.

Urbanmatz’ Space mat corner. You can see the subtle bluish halo around some of the stars that helps to make it feel richer in colour than the FFG mat…

…and FFG’s X-Wing Starfield mat’s corner. Just a little more squared off, but still rounded.

Urbanmatz left, Fantasy Flight right.

I really like the Urbanmatz Space mat. It’s on the same type of neoprene mousepad material as the official FFG Star Wars mat, but it feels a touch thicker and heavier, which I like. The starfield pattern is a little darker and feels richer in colour than the FFG mat, which by comparison is a little lighter. I think the UM mat seems richer and more colourful (despite being mostly just plain stars) is because of a slight bluish halo around some of the larger stars, which the FFG mat does not have. Corners are slightly different to the FFG in the way that they’re rounded off, but this doesn’t matter to me. I think the FFG’s mat’s slightly squarer corners would work better when butting the mat up next to another one, like the Death Star or Bespin or whatever to create a 6×3 playing area, so it makes sense. On the other hand, the 6×3 is self-contained at that size, so it’s a non-issue. While we were laying the FFG mat on top of the UM one, Marouda commented that she thought the Urbanmatz mat looked a lot better, so it wasn’t just me.

Urbanmatz’ Space 6×3 Mat on the left, overlaid with Fantasy Flight’s X-Wing Starfield 3×3 Mat on the right. You can see a fairly stark contrast between the two.

Pretty much the same photo as above, but with the lighting adjusted to a much “truer” representation of the darkness of both mats.

All in all, I’m very happy with both purchases and both products. If I were going to “start again”, I’d buy my 3×3 from Urbanmatz, as I like their space mat more than the FFG one, and I also appreciate the carry bag that Urbanmatz’ product came with, as it’s better than the cardboard box that the FFG one came with – and miles better than the nothing that my Mantic mats came with, or the throw-it-away cardboard box my GW green-flock field mat came in. Having said that, I’ve got no regrets in having started with the FFG mat, and taken on its own still looks great. Both get a solid thumbs up from me, though I do give the edge to Urbanmatz’ product based on the “black” of space being darker and the “colour” of the mat feeling richer, the mat itself feeling slightly thicker and heavier – which I prefer – and the included carry bag.

Urbanmatz’ mat bag. Comes with a full-length zip and some decent sized handles for carrying.

Each of the ends comes with a loop handle, so I guess you could hang the bags, as well as a little tag to let you know which mat is inside.

I’d love to see some kind of colourful nebula mat from Urbanmatz in the future. There are some amazing images out there of space, and a colourful one like that would be a great counterpart to the dark starfield. I’ll (hopefully) be reviewing the others I received in the next week or so – I haven’t even had a chance to open them up and look at them yet!

Like a fair few other people in our hobby, I backed the Conan Kickstarter a couple of years ago, and also like many of us, I had my first wave of stuff arrive recently. Now I only got around to taking the stuff out of the shipping boxes last week, and frankly, I haven’t had the time to look further into the actual boxed game or the equally huge “Kickstarter Extras” box. Boxes. I got two King Pledges… 😉

Conan’s Adventure Pack. Sans Barrels…

What I did do while I was cleaning up in the War Room and making space to put the Conan stuff onto one of the shelves was notice how nice the models in some of the add-on boxes looked. Specifically, the “Adventure Pack”. The models looked really fine, baby. That is to say that they looked very finely detailed. Much moreso than anything I’d expect to get from a boardgame, and moreso from a kickstarter boardgame where the usual reaction to the models is “yeah, these are pretty decent” or a sadly unsurprising disappointment. After seeing Subedai get busy with some of his Conan models, I thought “why not?” and opened up the adventure pack to paint the contents as they looked like they’d paint up nice and quickly.

…and here are Conan’s Barrels.

So that’s what we have here. Barrels. I haven’t started on the other stuff yet, but the barrels are pretty nice for what they are. I usually paintmy barrels up in the standard, admittedly boring way that most of us do. Dark brown wood, metal hoops. Job done. Nothing wrong with that, but with posts by Dagger and Brush on building trees with realistic bark colours resonating in the back of my head, I decided to paint these ones so that they looked a little more …realistic? worn? aged? So they would look like they’ve been left outside in the elements for their time. Faded, stained wood and rusted metal.

Conan’s barrels. Stacked. Somewhat..

Primed white, base coated with Vallejo Skeleton Bone coloured primer and then drybrushed with Reaper HD Arctic Grey. Hoops painted with Vallejo Plate Mail Metal coloured primer and then painted over with very-thinned Vallejo Model Air Light Rust and Orange Rust. The whole thing then washed with 50-50 Army Painter Soft tone wash and windex, and then with Citadel Nuln Oil Gloss. Gloss Polyurethane varnish, followed by Testor’s Dullcote. I’ve got that down here fo rmy future reference in case I end up with more of these barrels or want to recreate the exact look. It’s annoying when you paint everything that you have of some kind of scenery, and then find more somewhere, and then can’t remember exactly how you did them. I found some more of those Confrontation walls recently, and so now instead of having painted them more or less instantly, they’re just sitting there. In fact, I’ve lost them again somewhere. Bah.

Norsemen and their Norse Dwarf cousins discuss the best way to provide scale shots for barrels.

After checking the Kickstarter details, I see that each core pledge box comes with an extra 5 chests. Add those to the 5 in the accessories box and I’ll have 15 chests to paint up. They’re pretty finely detailed, but the thing stopping me from blasting through them now is working out how to paint them. Wood? Iron? Bronze? It’s bloody exhausting!

The next post of my small Vikingproject. A couple of weeks ago, when I got up on the morning of Christmas Eve 2016, I decided to paint up some Vikings, and see if I could get them done by Boxing Day. I very deliberately selected four figures. Two of them were the berserker pair that, while now part of the Foundry catalogue are ex-Citadel models from the truly Oldhammer days. Before everything was All-Warhammer, All The Time, Citadel has small ranges of Normans, Vikings and Feudals under the Fighters/F4 category. When Bryan Ansell resurrected Wargames Foundry as a Historicals company while purging the historical ranges from Citadel, he moved a large number of moulds across that he deemed appropriate. The two berserkers here were amongst the models who made the trip, and as such, are still available today.

Erik and Thorir the Ex-Citadel Foundry Vikings.

I actually owned both models back in the day. Erik, the model with the 2-handed daneaxe was broken at some stage, losing the axe and chunks of both arms – while Thorir, gazing at the sky, was simply lost to time. I notice that there are a couple of other old models that I always liked still available in the Foundry ex- range, so I’ll have to do another Foundry order before too long to pick them up. I should point out though that all of these models, like my other painted vikings in the above-linked posts came courtesy of the Cannon man from work.

These two were painted very quickly, and done on time. While painting them, I noticed the shield boss on Thorir’s shield. This was unfortunate, as I’d selected all four figures based on getting them done quickly, so the two old-school models that were mostly flesh and pants, and the other two that had a good amount of armour and chain on them – and no shields amongst them! So…. erm.

It took until the first days of 2017 before I got around to painting the shield. I decided on using muted tones for it, to go well with the muted and earthy tones I’d used for both berserkers’ clothing and gear. While I didn’t get the shield pattern perfect, I’m happy with how it came out nonetheless. At the same time I also fished out the model who is the Warlord for the moment – Eureka Miniatures’ Beowulf the Geat – and added some small freehand ravens to his shield, which makes a vast difference to the model in my opinion. I can’t fathom why Nik’s Beowulf range doesn’t have “Viking” keyworded anywhere in it. I’ll have to ring him and point it out since it can’t be helping his online sales. I know that technically, Beowulf predates Vikings by several hundred years, but when you’re selling miniatures…

Vikings with Daneaxes

The next pair of Vikings are essentially “just some guys”. I’m not sure of their manufacturers, though I think it’s pretty safe that they’re from different ranges given the difference in sculpt style. If/when I find out where they’re from, I’ll update. In the meantime I have nothing particularly interesting to write about them.

I used a little more in the way of the colour palette on these guys, but still kept them quite muted.

All together now….

Finally, a group shot of all my completed Vikings to date. There are quite a few more where they came from!

I have to admit, I couldn’t remember what these things were called and so it took literally minutes of playing internet detective to figure out what the game these things are from was called (and what they are). Armed only with “(illegible) games, 1992” on the bottom of their integral metal bases, google, wikipedia and BGG, I figured it out. Hooray!

The first of not all that many…

I bought these figures back in the ’90s for a few reasons. None of which had anything to do with Legions of Steel. 1) On sale. 2) Because Terminators. And most importantly, 3) They came in little miniatures carrying cases with foam inside. So naturally, I used the cases for a few years, the figures all got shunted into bits boxes, and that was that. I gave the cases away a year or two ago, (I think?) to Tarmor. At some point I found one of them and quickly painted it up, because let’s face it – how hard could it be? Had no idea where the rest of them were, though.

Thanks, oh Noble Knight, for your image. Have a link to your product in return.

So sometime last year while cleaning up some bits boxes – around the same time as I found and repainted that Judge Dredd RTB01 Space Marine – I found the “Nightmares”. Since I first found out that they’re called that literally 2 minutes before starting this post, I’m just going to call them Terminators from here on in. Anyway, I found the Terminators, and bundled them into a zip-lock bag alongside the tiny number of (licenced) Aliens miniatures I have from the same era. And then put them away in one of my Unpainted Miniatures Storage Cases. And promptly forgot about them until a few days ago, while attempting to tidy up the room where I keep all that crap, I bumbled onto them, sharing space with a bunch of Mantic models.

The Shiny Dozen.

This being my Summer break from work, and as I’m now getting in some good paint time, I brought them out, lost them, found them again and then painted them from Spray to Varnish to Flock in less than 3 days – most of which was drying time. So now I have a unit of 12… well. I can use them as Terminators in the Terminator Genisys game I picked up on sale during Black Friday. I understand it’s supposed to be quite a good game, but hampered by being massively overpriced for what you get in the box, and an expensive licence that seriously underperformed in the wider market, with the height of it’s popularity being, you know… 25-odd years ago. Still, when it was on sale for £20 I decided to grab it. Also, free rules if anyone wants to try it out.

Failing that I could use them as Necrons in 40k… I just picked up their Start Collecting set, and will probably grab a second one before too long. Or… as Cultists for my Iron Warriors? Hmm….

In November last year, for some reason I got it into my head to delve into one of my figure boxes and paint up a bunch of Dwarves. Specifically, to go through and paint a bunch of the Battle for Skull pass plastics that I’d picked up from eBay, WargamerAU and my mate, Damo. I think the idea popped into my brain since I’d been painting and finishing a few Slayers around the time and getting stuck into other randomdwarves (which I’ve been sharing recently).

Skull Pass Dwarves in Horde Mode.

By mid-November, I’d actually gathered them up, and selected the figures I was going to paint, and then got into them properly over December. Batch painted, they’re no works of art, but since there were 40 of them and work cranks itself up around November into December, I didn’t get them finished before work broke up for Christmas, as was the plan. All because of their overly-complex sculpted shields. After a few days of rest, I got stuck back into them again, but Marouda bought me Watch Dogs 2 which then proceeded to eat all of my time after I installed it and started playing it. I seriously played for near-17 hours the day I properly started it. From 8am until 1am. Sure, that’s with breaks, but still… I’m almost done with the game now, and I don’t even play it every day to get it done. A couple more hours and it should be done.

Skull Pass Dwarves ranked on movement trays. With a few spares for later…

These were a pretty quick and simple job for me, though every element is still highlighted and shaded, I did so with an intent of making a solid tabletop standard, rather than my usual care. At one point, I decided that I wanted them to look more work and war-weary than some of the others. Like they’ve been on campaign rather than having just left the keep in freshly washed uniforms. This was because I’d been looking at my unassembled boxes of Warlord’s Napoleonic French Line Lancers while washing my brushes (which I’d bought to turn into some sort of not-Brettonian army).

I got to thinking about how Napoleonic uniforms in miniature form always seem so bright, perfect and pristine when the actuality would have been much more filthy and worn. Like in that Napoleon show with Boromir Stark in it. With that percolating in my mind, I decided to hit them all with a brown wash, but then brighten up their axes, helms and paint the shields last – as I felt that Dwarves would always look after their wargear above all else.

Alec Trevelyan and friends, showing off the always-pristine uniforms of the period.

I mentioned the shields earlier. They were a hassle, and basically the reason these figures weren’t finished in December 2016, which would have broken my 2015 record/target and not caused me to fail to submit in the final month of the Tale of Gamers challenge I ran on Dakka. Of course there were other reasons. Watch Dogs 2 and burnout/exhaustion from working every day of the week for a period at the end of the year, but the shields were the final hurdle.

The Old and the New, united by a colour scheme and shield design.

If I were painting these models with no “history”, I’d probably have simply painted the Hammer-and-Anvil motif a nice bronze, much like the Dwarf-Mask bling on the Standard bearers. The thing is, when I started to paint the models, I realised that the same design was much older, and is featured on the (Marauder Miniatures) Dwarf Shields that one of my old, Oldhammer Norse dwarves has (and I have a few of these shields left to break out). Since I wanted the new to fit in with the old, being from the same clan(s), I wanted to make sure that they matched. Which meant going from a simple paint/wash/drybrush scheme to one that needed 10 different colours/applications. While keeping it simple. When doing it to almost 40 models, that takes time. Bleugh.

My freshly painted BFSP Dwarves, led by an Oldhammerer Dwarf.

What’s next for the Dorfs? Well, I appear to (almost) have a complete BFSP set between the various secondhand sets I’ve purchased. I’m just short the Dwarven rifles, so I’m going to see if I can get another unit or two painted before I burn out on Dwarves…

Post navigation

Photobucket Image Apocalypse:

Just a quick note to let visitors to my blog know that I am working my way backwards through the blog, repairing the image links that Photobucket cut off in their attempt to self-immolate their business. It’ll take some time, but it’ll get done.

My apologies for the inconvenience.

Update: Posts fixed back to 25th Sept, 2016 – Yay, over a full year of posts are intact again!

(and quite a few older posts beyond that, though not in any special sequence!)

Follow Azazel's Bitz Box via Email

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.